President Obama intends to nominate West Point graduate Bob McDonald as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. / Liz Dufour, Cincinnati Enquirer

by David Jackson and Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY

by David Jackson and Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY

President Obama intends to nominate West Point graduate Robert "Bob" McDonald - most recently chairman of Procter & Gamble, a Fortune 500 company - as secretary of the embattled Department of Veterans Affairs, wracked by a scandal of systemic delays in health care.

The nomination of McDonald, subject to confirmation by the Senate, was confirmed by two administration officials who declined to be identified ahead of the official announcement.

It comes a little more than four weeks after Obama's original choice as VA secretary when he took office in 2009 - former Army general Eric Shinseki - resigned under fire.

The acting agency undersecretary for the Veterans Health Administration and the VA general counsel also have tendered their resignations.

McDonald, 61, was with Procter & Gamble for 33 years. As CEO, he oversaw more than 120,000 employees, with operations around the world, selling products in more than 180 countries and more than 2.5 million stores, reaching more than 5 billion customers.

The son of an Army Air Corps World War II veteran, he graduated in the top 2% of his class at the U.S. Military Academy in 1975 and served five years in the Army. McDonald is a Republican, according to records at the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Ohio.

Word of the new nominee surfaced just 48 hours after Obama received a scathing internal review of the Department of Veterans Affairs on Friday.

A summary of those findings released Friday depicted a vast health care system - 150 hospitals and 820 outpatient clinics treating 6 million a veterans year - in which there was a "corrosive culture" marked by low morale, poor middle management and widespread distrust between workers and supervisors. The result was a chronic failure to get tens of thousands of veterans health care quickly, the review said.

There was muted reaction to McDonald from the veterans community.

"We still are trying to figure out who he is and what he's about," said Garry Augustine, a top official with Disabled American Veterans, one of the nation's largest veterans' service groups. "He's not well-known in the veteran community. Not known at all. We're looking forward to meeting him."

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chairman of the Senate VA committee, said he is looking forward to learning more of McDonald's views on the needs of the agency, which Sanders said include increased funding for doctors, nurses and other medical staff.

The House Committee on Veterans' Affairs has led much of the investigation uncovering widespread delays in health care at the VA. On Sunday, the panel's chairman, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said McDonald has his work cut out for him.

"Quite simply, those who created the VA scandal will need to be purged from the system," Miller said. "Personnel changes, however, won't be enough. The only way McDonald can set the department up for long-term success is to take the opposite approach of some other VA senior leaders."

"That means focusing on solving problems instead of downplaying or hiding them, holding employees accountable for mismanagement and negligence that harms veterans, and understanding that taxpayer-funded organizations such as VA have a responsibility to provide information to Congress and the public rather than stonewalling them," he said.

"Bob McDonald is ... the kind of person who is capable of implementing the kind of dramatic systemic change that is badly needed and long overdue at the VA," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said. "But the next VA secretary can only succeed in implementing that type of change if his boss, the president, first commits to doing whatever it takes to give our veterans the world class health care system they deserve."

Their report recommended fundamental restructuring of the healthcare branch of the VA. It complained of leaders who all but ignore alarms raised by the public, top VA leadership or oversight committees. The culture encourages discontent and backlash against whistle-blowers, the report said, noting that the largest single group of cases handled by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel - which provides protections for federal whistle-blowers - emanate from the VA and deal with patient health and safety.

The scandal began with complaints from a retired doctor who worked at a VA hospital in Phoenix and revealed that hundreds of veterans were not being seen quickly by doctors and that perhaps 40 had died as a result and that hospital leaders were covering up their mistakes.

An investigation by the agency's inspector general along with an internal VA audit found that problems with delaying care and falsifying records was systemic throughout the VA.

The agency has since been forced to contact 70,000 veterans whose appointments have been delayed and is working to get them quicker care. An agency audit found that within the past 10 years, at least 64,000 veterans who came to the VA for health care were never treated. Some 13% of VA schedulers across the country were instructed by supervisors to falsify appointment records, and 8% said they kept unofficial lists of patients whose names were kept out of approved electronic records.